The present invention relates generally to vehicle crash discrimination systems, and more particularly to a system for simulating vehicle crashes for testing vehicle crash discrimination sensors to determine statistical reliability.
In the past, vehicle crash sensor modules have been tested for reliability by continually crashing vehicles under different crash conditions. Alternatively, a small finite set of crash waveforms were also generated for a particular vehicle model by actually crashing the vehicle under different crash conditions (i.e., vehicle speed, crash location, etc.). The finite sets of crash waveforms were generally used to represent all possible crash situations when testing and/or developing crash discrimination systems.
However, purposefully crashing vehicles to either test a crash sensor module, or to generate a finite set of crash waveforms is prohibitively expensive. Also, the small finite sets of crash waveforms do not provide a reliable or realistic representation of all crash scenarios which can occur in real world situations. Thus, crash discrimination systems calibrated, or tested, using these finite sets of crash waveforms are possibly unreliable over the entire range of possible crash scenarios. Simply increasing the number of vehicles actually crashed to increase the different crash scenarios under which a crash sensor module is tested, or to increase the finite sets of crash waveforms is not a realistic solution due to the expense of crashing vehicles. Further, each crash involving the same vehicle and crash scenario typically generates statistically variant crash waveforms.